This study is part of a growing wave of interest in foreign language (FL) learners’ emotions, their sources, and their effects. Previous studies have confirmed that there is a clear relationship between the emotions of foreign language enjoyment (FLE), foreign language classroom anxiety (FLCA), foreign language boredom (FLB), and foreign language performance. However, the relative importance of each emotion as a predictor of FL performance has yet to be examined, and as different teaching and learning strategies can elicit different emotions, it is difficult to determine whether FL teachers and learners should prioritize a specific emotion in course design and study. We, therefore, utilized structural equation modeling and latent dominance analysis on a sample of 502 Moroccan EFL learners in order to examine the relative importance of each emotion in predicting FL performance. We argue that it is crucial to use sophisticated statistical analyses and to collect samples from outside Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) countries. The latent dominance analysis revealed that FLCA had the strongest (negative) effect on English test scores. FLB had a significant—but slightly weaker—negative effect and FLE had a significant—but weaker still—positive effect. As such, it is vital that FL teachers and learners not underestimate the impact of anxiety on language learning.

The field of technology and language learning, also known as CALL (computer-assisted language learning), is now a robust area of study informed by research and practice in the fields of language education, computer science, psychology, sociology, cognitive science, cultural studies, and, most of all, applied linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA). As with any other large field of study, some subareas have become the focus of study, often influenced by advances and research in applied linguistics, while others remain to be explored further; among these is the area of technology-mediated second/foreign language (L2) pragmatics, also known as interlanguage pragmatics. The lack of research in this area is puzzling if one considers that pragmatic competence is one of the essential components of communicative competence and that most of the technologies today exist in the service of communication. This article reviews the efforts so far to explore the connections between interlanguage pragmatics and a variety of technologies and innovations, as well as existing resources to bring L2 pragmatic teaching into the language classroom. It then suggests unexplored areas where technology could be used to aid the development of pragmatic competence and where pragmatic theory can inform SLA research.

Since the late 1990s, the field of applied linguistics has seen a revival of interest in the topic of linguistic creativity and language play, with several theoretical works spawning a variety of empirical studies of (second language) L2 learners. This chapter reviews recent literature in order to examine the reciprocal relationship between formulaic language and L2 language play. Formulaic language provides a point of reference against which other uses can be recognized as creative or playful. At the same time, language play can also create new linguistic conventions. Thus, while the relationship between formulaic language and language play has not been explicitly addressed, as the examples presented here will demonstrate, formulaic language is a necessary part of much language play. This article begins by theorizing the relationship between formulaic and playful language. This relationship is then examined in terms of functions, age differences, and media differences, and the article closes with a number of suggestions for future research.

In this paper we juxtapose the European Union's (EU's) supranational policies on language and migration with their recontextualisation into national policies of the linguistic integration of migrants in two EU member states, Austria and Greece. The EU member states adapt the European legislation according to their national laws (National Acton Plans) which have to also account for national traditions and national citizenship legislation. Moreover, we explore the national regulations on language testing and the linguistic integration of migrants in Austria and Greece which are part and parcel of the National Action Plans and which establish obstacles for migrants: Indeed, they function as gate-keepers. Hence, a context-dependent micro-level discourse analytic approach suggests itself.

The data for the analysis stem from legal and policy texts of the EU, Austria and Greece (regulations on citizenship, language education, testing and the linguistic integration of migrants). By employing the Discourse Historical Approach (DHA) of Critical Discourse Studies we analyze how specific EU regulations are implemented in national legislation; how migrants, who live in Austria and Greece are represented by the legislators, and finally how the respective national identities in the context of migration legislation are constructed.

Two current developments reflecting a common concern in second/foreign language assessment are the development of: (1) scales for describing language proficiency/ability/performance; and (2) criterion-referenced performance assessments. Both developments are motivated by a perceived need to achieve communicatively transparent test results anchored in observable behaviors. Each of these developments in one way or another is an attempt to recognize the complexity of language in use, the complexity of assessing language ability, and the difficulty in interpreting potential interactions of scale task, trait, text, and ability. They reflect a current appetite for language assessment anchored in the world of functions and events, but also must address how the worlds of functions and events contain non skill-specific and discretely hierarchical variability. As examples of current tests that attempt to use performance criteria, the chapter reviews the Canadian Language Benchmark, the Common European Framework, and the Assessment of Language Performance projects.

This chapter focuses on recent research in cross-cultural pragmatics (CCP) as distinct from interlanguage pragmatics (IP). The essential difference between the two lies in the perspective from which each views cross-cultural communication. CCP takes the point of view that individuals from different societies or communities interact according to their own pragmatic norms, often resulting in a clash of expectations and, ultimately, misperceptions about the other group. The misperceptions are typically two-way; that is, each group misperceives the other. In an age in which cross-cultural interaction is the norm not only across societies but also within them, different rules of speaking have the potential to cause stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination against entire groups of people. Research in the area of CCP can greatly aid in ameliorating these consequences. Recent studies that view CCP from this two-way perspective are the focus of this chapter. The overview of this body of research demonstrates the potential contribution of the field of applied linguistics to mutual understanding through the study of discourse issues in cross-cultural pragmatics.

This chapter reviews the multidimensional research on bilingual education, covering contexts where bilingual children are in transitional classrooms as well as schools where curriculum content is experienced in two (or more) languages. Bilingual education has become a major tool in language reversal planning, since language transmission within families within minority languages typically provides a considerable shortfall in language reproduction. To play its part in language reversal, bilingual education needs to show its relative effectiveness, both as an educational approach and for language maintenance planning. Immersion and dual language approaches have increasingly demonstrated such success. However, bilingual education is neither a universal panacea for language planners, nor is it effective purely due to dual language classroom approaches, as recent research reveals. Such research locates the political nature of bilingual education, not only at the level of policy making, but also in qualitative research in classrooms. It illuminates how language and literacy practices can latently legitimate and reproduce unequal relations between language majorities and minorities. Emerging directions in bilingual education research include trilingual education, the bilingual education of deaf students, the consequences of information technologies for bilingual classrooms, and the effect of the internationalization of English on language contact in schools. This reflects an international interest for research at the varying levels of philosophy, policy, provision, practice, and not least the politics of education as a site of language contact.

Second language acquisition research has historically been influenced by the field of linguistics, not only in terms of theoretical inisghts, but also in terms of the emphasis placed on varioustopics. Within linguistics, the lexicon has taken on a secondary role in terms of theory construction; within second language acquisition, the rift between studies of the lexicon and theory construction seems to be even greater. While it is no longer possible to say that the lexicon is the ‘neglected component’ of second language acquisition research, it does appear to be the case that most lexical studies are not centrally concerned with the establishment of a theory of the lexicon; rather, the majority deal with descriptive aspects of the lexicon.

There has been great recent interest in the social and policy context of language testing and assessment, to the point where it represents perhaps the most significant area of new thought and debate in the field of language testing. The topic has also produced a ferment of activity, reflected in policy statements, special symposia, and special issues of professional journals devoted to aspects of the subject. These discussions have been accompanied by the beginnings of a movement away from the traditional positivist, asocial paradigm for language testing research as traced in Lynch and Hamp-Lyons (1996; Hamp-Lyons and Lynch in press).

Over the last two decades, research has highlighted the important role that listening plays in language acquisition (Brown and Yule 1983, Ellis, et al. 1994, Faerch and Kasper 1986, Feyten 1991, Long 1985), and listening comprehension skills have begun to receive a lot more systematic attention in language teaching classrooms. A wide range of books, articles, and materials aimed at assisting teachers to develop learners’ listening skills are now available, and a variety of comprehension-based methodologies have been proposed (see, for example, Anderson and Lynch 1988, Courchene, et al. 1992, Rost 1990; 1994, Underwood 1989). However, although many of the tasks used for teaching listening are virtually identical to those which appear in tests, assessment of listening ability has received relatively limited coverage in the language testing literature.

Research into listening over the past three decades has, above all, highlighted the fundamental intricacy of the processes involved. In order to make sense of spoken messages, listeners may need to integrate information from a range of sources: phonetic, phonological, prosodic, lexical, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. The fact that we achieve all this in real time as the message unfolds makes listening “complex, dynamic, and fragile” (Celce-Murcia 1995:366). In this review I consider research into four aspects of these complexities: processes (e.g., speech recognition, discourse comprehension, and memory); the role of context; factors influencing listening; and the relationship of listening with other language skills. Finally I suggest likely directions for future research into listening.

Attempts to improve education often change how language is used in schools. Many such efforts aim to include minoritized students by more fully including their languages. These are often met with resistance not so much about language but more about identity. Thus processes of social identification are implicated in efforts to change language in education. If we are to understand how identity and language policy interconnect, we must analyze how stability and change are produced in each. This requires attention to macro-level patterns and to micro-level practices. But a two-scale account—micro instantiation of macro categories and micro changes shaping macro structures—does not adequately explain identity and language policy. This article focuses on educational language policy implementation, how language use and social identification change in an evolving policy context. We argue that change and stability in language policy implementation must be explained with reference to heterogeneous resources from multiple timescales—beyond micro and macro—as these resources establish and change social identities. We review recent research using multiple timescales to understand social processes like identification and policy implementation, and we illustrate the use of such a scalar account to describe the social identification of one student in a sixth grade classroom in Paraguay in the midst of a major national educational language policy change. We show how a person's identification as a new kind of minority language speaker involved heterogeneous resources from various spatiotemporal scales. We argue that analysis of the heterogeneous resources involved in social identification is essential to understanding the role that these processes play in cultural, pedagogical, and language change.

The recognition that speech formulas play a role in first language acquisition—that children reuse sequences of words taken directly and seemingly unanalyzed from the input—goes back to the earliest days of the field. Until fairly recently, however, such formulaic language was considered part of an early and soon-superseded stage of development. The last decade has seen the rise of a perspective on language development in which such formulas are central to language acquisition across development. According to this perspective, which is often known as the usage-based theory of language development, acquisition begins when children identify, infer a communicative function for, and start to utilize pieces of language of different sizes (single words and multiword sequences). Generalization, and as a result grammar, is an emergent property resulting from the ongoing coexistence of such sequences in a shared representational space. The growth in popularity of such an account, which represents a radical break from traditional models of grammatical development, has resulted in large part from the appearance of very large corpora of child–caregiver interactions. Such corpora have supported a new understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing the learner, as well as allowing new naturalistic analyses of children's productions and the creation of stimuli for experiments, all of which offer considerable support for the usage-based position. This article offers a review of these developments.

Law is language. It is not solely language, since it is a social institution manifested also in non-linguistic ways, but it is a profoundly linguistic institution. Laws are coded in language, and the processes of the law are mediated through language. The legal system puts into action a society's beliefs and values, and it permeates many areas of life, from a teacher's responsibilities to a credit card agreement. The language of the law is therefore of genuine importance, particularly for people concerned with addressing language issues and problems in the real world—that is, Applied Linguists.

American Sign Language (ASL) has become a very popular language in high schools, colleges, and universities throughout the U.S., due, in part, to the growing number of schools that allow students to take the language in order to fulfill a foreign or general language requirement. Within the past couple decades, the number of students enrolled in ASL classes has increased dramatically, and there are likely more instructors of ASL at the present time than ever before. ASL and spoken language instruction are similar in some aspects; however, there are also differences between the two (e.g., modality differences involving visual rather than auditory perception and processing, no commonly used writing system in ASL, and the socio-cultural history of deaf-hearing relations). In spite of these differences, minimal research has been done on ASL learning and classroom pedagogy—especially in recent years. This article reports on studies that have been performed recently and it also suggests various themes for future research. In particular, three main areas of research are proposed: the possible role of the socio-political history of the Deaf community in which ASL teaching is situated, linguistic differences between signed and spoken languages, and the use of video and computer-based technologies.

The present article provides a review of results from electrophysiological studies of the neurocognition of second language. After a brief introduction to event-related potentials (ERPs), the article explores four sets of findings from recent second language (L2) ERP research. First, longitudinal L2 ERP research has demonstrated that L2 neurocognitive processing changes qualitatively with time. Second, research has shown that L2 learners can evidence nativelike ERP effects for L2 grammatical features that are present in their first language (L1) as well as for features that are unique to their L2 but may have more difficulty processing features that are present in their L1 but that are instantiated differently in their L2. Third, emerging research has revealed that individual differences in ERPs can be accounted for by linguistic and nonlinguistic factors. Finally, recent empirical studies have shown that explicit and implicit training contexts can lead to nativelike ERP effects at high levels of proficiency, but that implicit contexts may lead to the development of a fuller nativelike processing signature, at least for syntactic processing. With continued interdisciplinary approaches and sophisticated research designs, L2 ERP research is only beginning to reach its potential and promises to uniquely inform central questions of second language acquisition.

Parkinson's disease, the most common progressive neurological movement disorder worldwide, causes slow deterioration of subcortical structures and dopamine deficiency, and the disruption of circuits connecting frontal lobe and basal ganglia regions. Although the motor and cognitive consequences of these structural and physiological changes have been well-documented, only a limited, albeit growing, empirical literature has examined the integrity of language abilities in individuals with Parkinson's disease. This article reviews recent advances in that literature that have furthered our understanding of the quantitative and qualitative changes in morphosyntactic, lexical-semantic, and discourse levels of language functioning associated with Parkinson's disease. This article also discusses the theoretical and applied implications of these linguistic symptoms and provides suggestions to forward this line of research.

On the basis of our examination of L2 writing scholarship published between 2000 and the present, we describe and reflect on developments relating to the teaching of L2 writing. While our primary focus is applied research, we have also addressed basic research that has clear implications for pedagogy. The paper includes an overview of relevant basic research (i.e., research on the phenomenon of second language writing), a discussion of relevant applied research (i.e., research on second language writing instructional principles and practices), an examination of some general issues and concerns that have important implications for second language writing instruction, and an assessment of the current status of the field along with our thoughts on where it might go in the future.

In the last 20 years, several authors have described the possible changes that computers may effect in language testing. Since ARAL's last review of general language testing trends (Clapham, 2000), authors in the Cambridge Language Assessment Series have offered various visions of how computer technology could alter the testing of second language skills. This chapter reflects these perspectives as it charts the paths recently taken in the field. Initial steps were made in the conversion of existing item types and constructs already known from paper-and- pencil testing into formats suitable for computer delivery. This conversion was closely followed by the introduction of computer-adaptive tests, which aim to make more, and perhaps, better, use of computer capabilities to tailor tests more closely to individual abilities and interests. Movement toward greater use of computers in assessment has been coupled with an assumption that computer-based tests should be better than their traditional predecessors, and some related steps have been taken. Corpus linguistics has provided tools to create more authentic assessments; the quest for authenticity has also motivated inclusion of more complex tasks and constructs. Both these innovations have begun to be incorporated into computer-based language tests. Natural language processing has also provided some tools for computerized scoring of essays, particularly relevant in large-scale language testing programs. Although computer use has not revolutionized all aspects of language testing, recent efforts have produced some of the research, technological advances, and improved pedagogical understanding needed to support progress.

Computer technology provides learners with new and varied options for language learning through interactive tasks delivered through CD-ROMs, Web pages, and communications software on the Internet. Researchers need to reconsider any approach to second language acquisition (SLA) concerned with explaining how language development is prompted by exposure to the target language in view of the dramatic differences in language experience learners engage in due to computer technology. Virtually all theories are concerned with the role of linguistic input or the environment (VanPatten & Williams, 2007), and therefore technology needs to be considered.